Tape drives and media for backing-up data are enhanced over time with newer tape drives and media providing various benefits over older ones. As newer tape drives and media become more mature and gain market share, older tape drives and media are often phased out and become unavailable. For example, the sole remaining supplier of the so-called 36-track tape drive has ceased manufacturing such drives and will discontinue support for the drives.
Tape drives such as the 36-track tape are typically supported for as long as the spare parts supply lasts. After that, users of obsolete tape drives having data stored on tapes associated with an obsolete tape drive have no way of accessing that data. FIG. 1 shows a conventional computer system 100 including a computer 102, for example a server, an old tape drive 104, and a new tape drive 106. In the prior art, users who have upgraded to a new tape drive 106 typically keep their old tape drive 104 online so that data written to tapes associated with the old tape drive 104 may be restored if needed. However, this data may become inaccessible when the old tape drive 104 fails and the necessary parts for repair are no longer available. A need therefore exists for a method and system for managing data transfer between different types of tape drives and media.
Recently, there have been published reports of backup and archival tapes containing sensitive data being lost (either in-house, in transit to an off-site storage facility, or at the off-site facility itself). Most of these cases have involved tapes that contain data that is not encrypted and therefore could be potentially read and misused if they were to fall into the wrong hands. With most of the focus of data security in the past few years dealing with networking and the Internet, this has exposed a forgotten area of security when dealing with tape media, especially if tapes are sent off-site. Tape encryption is proposed most often as a solution to this problem.